GS&P BLK · Goodby Silverstein & Partners · 2021
Preach.
An Instagram game that gave Black people a platform to share their real experiences — built from inside GS&P by the people who lived it.
An Instagram game that gave Black people a platform to share their real experiences — built from inside GS&P by the people who lived it.
Black History Month gets a lot of retrospective — tributes to the past, celebrations of legacy. What it gets less of is right now. The present-tense reality of what it's like to be Black in America today.
Preach was our answer. An Instagram and Facebook Stories filter-game built by GS&P's Black employee resource group, BLK, that invited Black people everywhere to share their experiences — funny, frustrating, controversial, and everything in between — in a format that felt native to how they were already talking online.
"Have you ever been told you talk white?"— Round 1: Rapid Fire
The game ran as an AR filter on Instagram and Facebook Stories — two rounds, designed to move from surface-level recognition to deeper conversation.
Yes or no questions about shared Black experiences. Fast, visceral, relatable — designed to make people laugh and then think.
Open-ended questions that asked players to elaborate — turning a game into a genuine cultural conversation.
I co-created Preach alongside fellow BLK member and strategist intern Ezana Ataktli. This one was ours from the start — the brief, the concept, the content, the execution. We led every part of it.
My job was figuring out how to make the questions land. That meant interrogating the Black experience with enough specificity to feel real, while keeping the format approachable enough that people would actually share it with their networks. The goal wasn't to educate non-Black people — it was to build something for us, by us, that non-Black people could witness and learn from.
We also produced "One Day at a Time," a companion short film that gave GS&P BLK members space to share their own experiences in long form — identity, self-care, what it actually feels like to navigate this industry as a Black creative.
"One Day at a Time" was a companion piece to Preach — a short documentary where GS&P BLK staffers spoke openly about their experiences, from identity to self-care to what it means to show up at work as your full self.
Advertising agencies spend a lot of time talking about authentic Black voices. Preach was one. We didn't pitch it to a client, we didn't wait for a brief. We made the thing we wanted to make because we had something to say — and we had the tools to say it.
The press coverage validated the concept, but the real signal was the people playing it. Seeing Black people across the country sharing their Rapid Fire results, tagging friends, filming their Speak On It responses — that was the point.